After two months of political tensions that boiled over into street riots, Hungary now awaits a winter truce, but tempers could flare in spring over government austerity measures, analysts said.
A referendum, initiated by the main conservative opposition Fidesz party, is planned for spring on the Socialist-Liberal government's economic reforms, which include ending free public university education and raising individual healthcare contributions.
These reforms, aimed at overhauling wasteful public services, come on top of tax increases, energy price subsidy cuts, and mass public sector layoffs.
Local press reports have speculated that the price of gas could go up by as much as 70 percent for some consumers.
The government is scrambling to raise revenues and cut the highest public deficit in the EU, projected at 10.1 percent of GDP this year.
"[Spring] will be the time of labor unions, which are relatively weak, of protests and strikes after people come to terms with what awaits them with these neo-liberal [austerity] measures," sociologist Miklos Gaspar Tamas said.
In September, Budapest was rocked by street riots after the leak of a recording in which Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany is heard saying the government lied to voters about the state of the economy in order to win re-election in April.
Fidesz leader Viktor Orban, who lost the past two parliamentary elections, has said the riots were caused by outrage over Gyurcsany's false promises of tax cuts and society's rejection of the austerity measures.
The government, however, has said it was Orban who sparked riots with his inflammatory anti-government rhetoric, which galvanized violent far-right extremists who rampaged in the streets of Budapest on three nights in September.
Orban rode the wave of violence in a bid to oust Gyurcsany, organizing daily street demonstrations until Oct. 23, when riots erupted again on the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule.
Unfazed, Gyurcsany has pledged to stay on. He was strengthened after winning a vote of confidence in parliament early last month and by the fizzling out of anti-government demonstrations as cold weather set in.
"With the arrival of the winter, there will likely be a pause" in protests, said Peter Balazs, professor at Corvinus University in Budapest.
Fidesz still refuses to talk with Gyurcsany -- walking out of parliament each time the prime minister rises to speak -- but the main opposition party has backed down from calls for street protests.
One analyst said the economic challenges facing the country and the planned referendum, which still must be approved by the national electoral commission, could force the two main political parties to cooperate in the future.
"[The referendum] could build bridges by triggering a more rational discussion on the reform of pensions, social security and state administration," said Istvan Stumpf, a former minister under Orban and now an analyst at Szazadveg Foundation.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
RSS